Human Powered Search – Cleaning up the SERP results
Posted by Matt Attwell, January 23 2008 at 12:08A very interesting article was published on ReadWriteWeb.Com regarding a discussion between Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia Search, Jason Calacanis from Mahalo.com and Marissa Meyer, Google’s VP of Search.
Jimmy and Jason each gave a brief overview of their human powered search engines.
The discussion then follows on how search engine results are irrelevant and filled with spam and weird stuff. Jason railed on Google and other big engines, saying algorithms have failed to control spam and SEO gaming, and that humans must be involved to get good results.
Jason was more circumspect, and spent most of his time arguing that large numbers of people will be willing to spend time helping Wikia Search develop good results.
As a member of these sites like Wikia Search and Mahalo, the results you achieve are significantly better because we’re incorporating human intelligence into the mix.
Wikia Search will have another social angle. Users will be able to find other contributors to work on the search engine with them, behind the scenes from the masses who just want results.
Mahalo, an evolving human-powered Web guide primarily uses paid staffers to create its topic pages. A new “Mahalo Follow” feature lets users easily recommend sites to the engine– a more cost-effective way to quickly build a library of human-approved links.
Wales v. Calacanis
Marissa Mayer Comments
Basic transcript of the session at the conference.

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